Users of individual computers often customize the more-or-less generic computer provided to them by a vendor. For instance, users may set various operating system and application program preferences, add new peripheral devices and corresponding drivers, load new application programs, create documents with application programs, select background bitmaps, and so on. Administrators who are responsible for multiple computers in a business, agency, institution, or other entity often make similar changes in order to customize those computers for particular users or groups of users.
Tools exist for migrating such user profile information to new machines, by copying them from the old machine to the new machine. These migration tools may also be used to copy user profile information over a network to a remote storage location when a network client is replaced or upgraded. After a new machine is installed, or a new image is installed on an existing machine to upgrade the client, the user profile information can be copied back over the network to the client and applied there to customize the client.
However, not every computer that needs a new image customized by old user profile information is attached to a network. Moreover, even if a network is available, substantial space may be required on network servers to simultaneously hold the user profiles of attached clients when all of those clients need to be modified by a new image that is then to be customized by their respective old user profile information. Of course, less space is needed if the clients are modified one-by-one, but much more time is then required than if multiple clients could be modified more or less concurrently.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved tools and techniques to coordinate the imaging of one or more computers with the migration of user profile information to the imaged computer(s). Such tools and techniques are described and claimed herein.